How Brazil's Banking Golden Boy, Arrested in Rio, Built an Empire

Andre Esteves, the brash banker who once joked his firm’s name, Grupo BTG Pactual, stood for ‘better than Goldman,’ became the latest high-profile executive dragged into Brazil’s widening corruption scandal.

   The 47-year-old billionaire was arrested Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro, along with Senator Delcidio Amaral, police said. Esteves allegedly sought an agreement with Amaral to interfere with testimony from a jailed former executive of oil producer Petroleo Brasileiro SA, according to a court document.

   Esteves made a splash on the international financial stage -- and became Brazil’s youngest self-made billionaire -- when he sold Pactual to UBS for $2.6 billion in 2006. He and partners bought it back three years later and set off on an expansion, snapping up businesses including the Swiss private-banking unit of Assicurazioni Generali SpA. The firm sold shares to the public in 2012.

   “He epitomizes the idea of a private, successful, entrepreneurial generation of Brazilian bankers -- that’s what he represents,” said Felipe Monteiro, a professor of strategy at Insead in France. His alleged involvement “with the most classic type of old politics is somehow strange.”

Πηγή: bloomberg.com